Worming Up-II

Continued from here…..

Nothing is as exciting as taking up new challenges. The most difficult challenge for me was to overcome the fear of letting worms crawl all over your hands, and yet not drop them out of fear and injure them. These are the tobacco worms the department has been breeding for decades now. My challenge was to learn the art of doing it rightly in 5 days’ training, and yet not feel sick every time I entered the smelly breeding room.

No worms as a prize to guess that I went ahead and took up the job. The first day, I just followed the guy who was training me. And I had no freaking clue about what was happening. This is the same guy who says bok of inseks and botton (guess what, I think he calls his sexy wife ekki) and who has sternly written instructions all over the place in wrong English (e.g., please do not removed the machine). I was handed a checklist of some 50 things to do while he went around changing worm boxes, putting older ones into newer boxes, and categorizing them based on certain characteristics. If you happen to be in the biosciences or have little interest in insects, you will know that most insects have 4 life stages- egg, larva, pupa, and adult. These were the diagrams in the good old biology textbooks. The larval stage could further be divided into 3rd, 4th, and 5th instar stages.

Now….

My trainer has left for “botton” after training me to feed “insek” (he cannot say “S”, poor thing).

I start my job at 8 every morning, first categorizing the larvae into different boxes based on the presence or absence of eyes and the shape of the head (let me spare you the details).

Then, I take the adult worms from the previous days which are no longer feeding and put them in dry wooden blocks. You know that they are ready to go without food when they smack the food all around the cups and a thick black line appears on their back. Here see the difference for yourself.

Once put in blocks, they go without food and in a few days, they all reach the pupae stage with the brown covering that makes them look like cockroaches.

After a few days, when the pupae turn black and soft from being brown, they are left in the cages where they emerge into adult moths.

The adult moths live on sugar water, and lay eggs on the underside of the tobacco plant leaf.

These are attracted to light and hence every time you take the plant out of the cage, you need to switch off the lights and have to know your way in the darkness. Once the plants are taken out, eggs are collected by gentle scraping with the hand without damaging the leaves. There are two varieties of worms, the green ones and the black ones. These are the collected eggs.

Three days later, the eggs are made to hatch on a thin strip of food. The food is a special diet made with calculated amounts of vitamins and antibiotics, and smells ten times more horrible than fermented dosa dough. In the pic, moisture is being wiped off the surface of the food block to be cut into pieces.

When the eggs hatch into thin hairy beings on the strips of food, they look like this.

About 200 of them are put in small cups everyday and allowed to grow.

After a couple of days, they are transferred to a bigger cup, and the cycle is repeated again.

Look how the worms get a grip on the food and dig it out with their pointed jaws.

Sometimes, eggs hatch out into weird looking creatures. Naah, this is nor Surf Ki Safedi Lalita ji. It is just a whiter worm.

Challenges 

First, the sheer number of things intimidated me. There are 3 huge rooms filled with boxes like this and I had to know my way through them.

The second challenge was to put the larva into the dry box. These are extremely soft and the moment you hold them, they start wriggling their heads and butts. Yet you cannot drop them or squish them. This is how they looked. 

And this is how you put them into the dry blocks with your hands.

I remember how the guy asked me to use forceps to do that, and I was touched with his compassion for me. My hopes came crashing down when he dutifully informed me that he wants me to use the forceps because he doesn’t want me to injure the worms. When I put the worms into the boxes, they wriggle their heads and crawl out. Soon, I figured out a way to grip them softly by the neck and put their head facing downwards so that it was difficult for them to crawl out.

Learning and knowledge gained

I have learnt how to distinguish between a male and a female pupa looking for a tiny hole somewhere in the male pupa. Imagine the chaos holding a brown pupa which is wriggling itself furiously trying to locate a freaking hole.

It was a challenge to come to the lab every morning (even on the weekends) and not faint out of the smell and the trauma of dealing with these creepy crawly things. The initial few days were so bad that everything I ate smelt of them. I would step onto something and get startled, wondering if I had stepped on an insect. I would rummage through my bag for a pen and then back off immediately wondering if some of those insects have crawled into my bag. I killed so many insects by dropping them abruptly because they wriggled so much and I was too scared to touch them.

But eventually, things got better. Eventually, I stopped using the forceps and started to hold them with my hands. The way they crawl and cling to the skin gives you a very uncomfortable feeling. But at least they do not bite. I mean these are merely insects. Things could have been worse. I could be working in a lab full of white rats or sting rays, getting bitten by them every now and then. I could be working in a lab full of snakes. I could be working with the chimps, the monkeys, crocodiles or whatever. These are just tiny harmless insects.

Like I said, this job isn’t related to what I study. But one of the best things about the US is that one can learn anything one wants to. One could be waiting tables, feeding insects, or working as a car mechanic on the side. Even when you are a student from a different department, you could do so many things. You could work in the library, feed worms, take poetry classes, learn graphics designing, learn or teach languages, and so on. The opportunities are endless. You acquire newer skills, make new contacts, and get to do something different, even if that means dealing with wriggling, crawling green creatures.

I am so glad I didn’t chicken out the day I went to see what the training was like. And if you get my point, go take a break off your hectic work life and learn something new. Not only does it teach you a lot, but it also acquaints you with things you could never think of.

Let me know the next time you learnt something which was totally unrelated to what you are doing now.

sunshine

Everyone Loves A Good Tsunami.

Updates- clips to the play-

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgx7rF8K1kk&mode=related&search=

2.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7Ew_b2jE9c

Spoilers ahead-

Go watch it if it’s not too late. It is every dollar- paisa wasool.

I have never been much of a play person. Or maybe I never moved in the right play circles. But curiosity, Friday evening, and my friend acting here made me decide to go to the play.

Set in the San Francisco bay area in Dec. 2004-Jan.2005, this comic satire beautifully portrays the nuances of human emotions like rivalry, competitiveness, the need to feel important, and the urge to outsmart others. Dr.Sunil Ahuja is the president of the Indian Association who has been betrayed by Panjawani, the vice-president, who starts his own parallel desi group called the Indian Council and many members of the IA flock to IC, much to the dismay of Dr.Ahuja. Wanting to do better than the Republic Day Parade organized by the IC (rumored to have invited Amitabh Bachchan as the celebrity of the event), IA decides to organize a fund raising concert for the Tsunami victims (remember, it is set in Dec., 2004).

Ahuja leaves no stone unturned to make the concert more successful than the republic day parade. Jindal, his right hand and another surviving member of the IA, tries to invite every celebrity from Lata Mangeshkar to Sonu Nigam. Unfortunately, this far exceeds their budget. They think of bringing some lesser known singer, one of the winners of Sa Re Ga Ma at a much cheaper rate. However at the end, they make it into a local talent show with their own children performing (and his daughter Pinky winning the first prize in Piano as well). A very ambitious plan to actually bring a tsunami survivor on stage actually ends up in Sushma ji, another surviving member of the IA, giving a condolence speech. She is portrayed as the survivor who has suffered a deep trauma because 40 years ago, they had South Indian neighbors in Delhi and though she has no contacts with them, she assumes that the neighbors are dead or are victims of the tsunami. She thus deeply mourns the loss of the neighbors.

Oh, by the way, they take quite a while to argue over the name of the concert till they change it from Tsunami Hungama (hungama?) to Tsunami 2005. Eh, why not Tsunami Bumper Dhamaka then?

I loved the little touches here and there, like how Indu (Dr.Ahuja’swife) runs a women’s organization called Patita (alleged by Dr.Ahuja to consist of husband-hater women), the way his elder daughter Aarti from Stanford brings out a calendar of nude men and women with her friends to raise money for the victims, and how the pundit says that no one died in the tsunami because what we perceive as death is merely the soul changing bodies just like the body changes clothes (interesting !). When the newspaper reporter arrives, everyone forgets the cause and all are in their own worlds trying to gain publicity with their stories and wanting to be in the limelight of the group picture.

Panjawani finally arrives at the end, coaxing Dr.Ahuja to jointly form the Association of Indian Council (AIC) and together they pledge over whiskey that they will organize a Tsunami-concert every year, like Tsunami 2006, Tsunami 2007.

But will there be a tsunami next year?, Dr.Ahuja asks with whatever wisdom he has.

Arre tsunami nahin to kya hua, India mein har saal kuch na kuch to hota hi rehta hai. Based on that, we shall make the concert a huge success every year.

And thus they join hands once again. Who cares about raising money for the tsunami victims? It is the position of the president and all the publicity that comes along with it that drove these two men.

Beer before whisky? Very risky.

Whisky before beer? No fear.

I loved these lines of the play. Along with many more.

I know it wouldn’t make much sense unless you have seen it. But in case you get a chance, GO WATCH IT !!!

Great job everyone !!! And yeah, non-Seattleites, just watch out for the link posted here if the play comes up on youtube :).

sunshine.

Worming Up- I.

This summer, I decided to broaden the periphery of my learning, and do something unusual. I was skimming through the students’ board for campus job opportunities when something interesting caught my eyes.

Needed someone to feed the insects.

Now this was not exactly something I’d jump at. However, I emailed the professor and she agreed to meet me. She informed me that no graduate student had done anything like this before, and she also made it clear that the pay would be hourly and low. Moreover, I’d be expected to work on the weekends. But this being the time when the course load is low, I decided to give it a shot instead of whiling my time in shopping malls. We decided on a week’s training before I took charge.

Day 1-

She took me around to show me things and introduce me to the guy who’d train me. It seemed that he was leaving town for a while and the department needed a temporary replacement. The first thing that caught my nose is the stench so very characteristic of any animal lab. While she introduced me to the guy and left, I could almost feel my stomach churning and crying to puke.

My trainer was a Vietnamese guy, a short fellow reaching almost till my shoulders with hair standing out like a porcupine. And here read his English.

Trainer: There are many bokk of insek here. I go to Botton so you take care and feed insekk.

I could laugh and laugh the way he funnily skipped the S and replaced it by a K. What more, I went home and tried to peak like him. I mean speak like him.

I was taken to a lab full of these worms at different stages of their life. Anybody with a basic idea of entomology would know that most insects go through four main life stages of egg, larva, pupa, and adult. My job was to keep the cycle going, which consisted of about 25-30 steps daily. Mornings would take me some 4 hours while evenings would take me another one hour.

The first time I saw the insects, I wanted to flee as far from the department as I could. Let it suffice to say that I am an extremely touch-sensitive person who has never even let G's cat close till date in fear that the cat’s fur would brush on my skin. My nightmares consist of being in a room with insects let out, crawling all over me. It seemed that my nightmares we coming true after all.

My trainer told me to use forceps initially. I was pleased that he was aware of my discomfort. But he told me that that's because I should be gentle with the insects and not injure them and squish them in nervousness or fear, so it is better that I start with the forceps initially.

Now here take a look at the worms. They come in two types, the wild type (green ones) and the black type.

By the time I had watched him doing stuff on day 1, I had decided that I was not taking up the job. I could sell newspapers, work as a waitress, or do anything else. But it was a torture to spend five hours a day in such stench, letting hundreds of worms wriggle all over your hands. Come on, I was not really one of those shorts-clad guys from the Discovery channel who got their kicks out of jutting their hands into snake pits.

Later that night, she came into my room to have a talk with me. She as in my alter ego, my second half that talks to me during confusion and apprehension. And she told me this-

Look, someone has to do it. And you are helping someone in their research. If all this while you sold apple pies, now you are helping grow the apples. It might not be something as hot as learning to fly planes, but it is a job after all. If your dentist could make a living out of peeping and poring into people’s mouths (or worse still, think of your gynecologist), if masseuses could make a living out of oiling huge blobs of fat of strangers, if your local Govinda hair salon (pronounced as Gobindo heyar cheloon) could make business cutting lice-infested hair with dandruff, what was wrong in helping the department breed worms? For all the research you did with rat fetus, did you ever realize that someone actually does the job of extracting the rat fetus out of the mother’s body?
Will sunshine realize the point of her alter ego? Will she decide to go out of the way and take up the job that needed her to be in stinking places with worms all around her? Will she help the department and also gain some very unusual experience in the process? The experience might not make her a stellar resume, but it is an art learnt and a skill acquired nevertheless. Will her alter ego convince her that no experience in life whatsoever, goes waste? Will sunshine mentally prepare herself to deal with the occupational hazards of the job where she would have to touch the wriggling insects, clean insect exuvia (the dead remains of the insects or the skin they shed during molting), and work at weird timings like 7 AM on a weekend? Or will she chicken out, spend the summer comfortably hanging out in shopping malls and hogging on pizzas and burritos?

We will see.

sunshine.

Hidden Treasures.

I was clearing up the table of a professor to make some lab space. This meant papers needed to be filed, files needed to be put neatly into cardboard boxes and put away someplace where they could be retrieved when needed. It took me longer than I anticipated, and I was covered with dust and grime. Anyway, a few hours of toil and aching muscles later, the files were put away, boxes shoved elsewhere and the place looked more in order. It is then that my eye caught on something. Something extremely mesmerizing that was hidden behind the files by the walls for God knows how long. I hesitated only a bit, wondering if it would be proper on my part to go and talk to the professor about this. I mean, I was not really eight anymore.

Debating, I finally went up to the professor and told him I had found this behind the files. I asked him if it was okay for me to take them home. The professor gave me a look of utter surprise, wondering if this was the right age of be excited about things like this. However, he gladly let me take them home. And every morning, I look at them mesmerized, wondering how different and yet how enthralling they look. For many, these are nothing more than few pieces of junk. For me, it is like a treasure hunt.

This is what I am talking about.

sunshine.

The Cycle Of Crime.

A picture is worth a thousand words. And a gesture is worth a thousand warnings. Was taking a stroll in the campus when I came across one of the many cycle stands. I saw this.

And this.
And finally this !!!!

Amazing idea, whoever’s it is to get rid of the tires to carry while leaving the cycle frame behind.

There are so many things to see and learn in life. Beyond the text books I mean.

sunshine.

Truncated Love.

Hi

Wazzup

Hr u?

Gr8 gr8.

U liked the buk?

ROTFLMAO

temme

Gud

I lv u

Me2

I lv u 1/0

k. gtg. Brb.

Wtf?

lol. ttyl. Gtg.

k. tc.

U2.

Now that is what I call the expression of love in codes. Anybody care for full sentences, correct spelling and proper grammar?

Gtg.
-
sunshine.

Let’s SLEEP Over It.

Did you know?

I can usually go to sleep after I have woken up.

I cannot watch any movie in one go, not even a 90 minute English movie. I need to take at least one nap in between. Even at movie theaters. Ask my friends. We once went to watch Eklavya. I dozed off in an action-filled scene where Amitabh was crouched on mud in the sweltering heat amidst the lanky legs of the camels. The next scene, I see Saif and Amitabh together, only to wonder what happened in between.

G claims that she cannot sleep at anytime but night. I wonder why. I just need a place to lie on and close my eyes, telling myself that I need to fall asleep in the next 10 minutes. And this way, I can fall asleep even amid loud music.

The more exams draw near, the more I get tensed. The more I get tensed, the more I sleep. The more I sleep, the sleepier and guiltier I feel. Guilt only increases my tension, making me sleep all the more. Now this is what I call a real life synergistic effect of a vicious cycle.

I often hang around with a bunch of party animals. They meet at 8, start cooking at 9, eat dinner at 11, and then watch a movie or play a game, only to wind up at 3 in the morning. No matter what state the party is in, by 11 pm, I am fast asleep on the couch. These guys watch a movie while I sleep, call me when they are about to leave, I accompany them to the car sleepy-eyed, one of them drops me to my place, I climb up the stairs with my eyes closed, go back to my room, and resume my sleep from where I had left it.

I loved Vegas. I didn’t mind all the walking and casino hopping, as long as I had my 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep at night. No wonder he went home and told his mom that I am the only woman he has seen who sleeps so much.

My naps are as dream-filled as you could imagine. My dreams are a potpourri of action-packed, comic, tragic, suspense-filled and romantic melodrama.

Sleep is therapeutic for me. When I am stressed, I prefer sleeping instead of crying.

I have never had to take sleeping pills. Believe me even consuming pills prescribed to make me sleep less wouldn’t help.

I can never breeze through a class without dozing off at least once. Seminars are definitely meant to be slept in. My max concentration time is about an hour. When I can’t sit through a class, I sleep through it. I can even sleep in class with my eyes wide open. And just so that I do not fall asleep, I take my laptop to classes.

I remember a funny episode when we had a picture exhibition of one of the best wildlife photography. There was a slideshow in a dark room for about an hour, and they were showing pics of animals in the order of their biological classification. This meant that the order would be like this-

Ø Plants and trees
Ø Microbes (bacteria, virus)
Ø Protozoa
Ø Porifera
Ø Cnidarians (jellyfish)
Ø Platyhelminths (flatworms)
Ø Annelids (roundworms and earthworms)
Ø Arthropods (cockroach, spider, prawn, shrimp)
Ø Mollusk (snails)
Ø Echinoderms (starfish)
Ø Fish
Ø Amphibians
Ø Reptiles
Ø Birds
Ø Mammals

Well, I remembered till the Cnidarians. With the darkness and the AC going full blast, who cared? When I woke up, they were almost at the end of the slideshow, showing the picture of monkeys and tigers. And I had gasped aloud- “But how did they come to monkeys so soon?"

While I travel in a train, all I need is the upper berth. I love the rocking motion of the train. Barring occasional loo breaks and food breaks, I have dozed the entire length of tracks from Kolkata to Chennai.

I can never read a book on the bed to relax. I eventually fall asleep. I need to be wide awake and upright in the study even to watch a movie or read a book.

They say I sleep a lot. I say my heavy-duty batteries take a little more time to get charged.

It often happens that I fall asleep in the afternoons, only to wake up in the fading light of the evenings to imagine it to be dawn the early morning and start getting ready for school.

If I am hungry and there is no food at home and I am too lazy to cook or to go out to eat, I can fall asleep in order not to feel the hunger.

There have been more than one occasion when I have fallen asleep prior to the day of the examination, only to wake up the next morning and realize that I haven’t yet started to study.

Back in India, I couldn’t sleep in loud music or even if the night bulb glowed. After coming here, life has been so stressed and my lab work requires such weird hours that I have trained myself to catch occasional naps amid work. Most days, I do not even come home to sleep. I sleep on the couch in the lab amid the droning of machines. Unfamiliar surroundings do not bother me anymore.

I once applied to a study where all you had to do was sleep, while they traced your sleeping and dreaming patterns. I wish they had selected me.

I have slept through Sleepless in Seattle, Sleeping with the enemy, and eyes wide shut. I haven’t yet tried the movie Jaagte Raho.

Unlike other lovers, I can never claim that I have lost sleep thinking of someone.

If they made a movie about me, I’d never let them name it Sona Manaa Hai. Guess what I’d call it? Sleeping in Seattle.

All said and done, I lead as much of an active life as anyone else would. I gym, I dance, I attend classes and hang around with friends, I go for hiking, I blog, and I do a lot more. It is just that I take sleep as seriously as any other thing I do in life.

The Sleeping Beauty signing off now.

sunshine.

Something sweet?

Ever woken up in the middle of the night craving for sweets? Naah, I do not mean the American cheese cake or the black forest cake, but the typical Indian sweets? Now, I never buy sweets from the Indian stores. I once bought 10 laddus in all of 4 varieties on a Friday evening, wanting to share it with my lab mates the next Monday. The entire weekend I had spent dipped in bucketful of guilt, having eaten all the laddus myself.

People have a sweet tooth. I claim that all my 28 teeth are sweet. And of all the days, I had to crave for sweets when I didn’t even have milk at home. How to I pacify myself?

Irritated and grumpy with myself, I got out of bed, brushed, and put on my thinking cap. I wish I could go back to sleep fantasizing about sweets, but that was not happening. Think harder! Something had to be done to mollify this sudden bout of sweet craving.

I heard the next door guy use the microwave. Still awake so late? I could already see my plan taking shape.

* Went out and told him hi, and gave him my sweetest smile.

* Told him that I barely saw him these days and if he was working very hard to get that Nobel prize he rightfully deserved.

*Opened the fridge and scooped out a whole large spoonful of vegetable curry for him, telling him that this is an Indian delicacy I was planning to share with him.

*Delved into the fridge, digging my nose into it and then making incoherent regret moans. Tsk tsk.

* Told him that since I had to keep awake at night studying, I came looking for some coffee, but it’s fine since I did not have milk.

Thankfully, my plan worked and he almost jumped at me, trying to help. 

“Oh no milk? Take it from me. And don’t ask me again, if you need for coffee, take it anytime you want”.

I started to act all coy and “no-no, thank you so much but I’ll survive without milk”, but after he left and shut his door and before he could open the door again telling me that he had changed his mind about the milk and being helpful, I grabbed at it.

Coffee be darned, I filled half the frying pan with milk. Put it on low flame and left it that way. But what to do with milk? Think, think.

Suddenly, a brilliant idea hit me. I had this huge packet of breakfast cereals that was quite misleadingly called “Honey bunches of oats with almonds”. I had bought it all greedy about the almond part, only to discover that there was one thin shaving of one-twentieth of an almond for every five spoonful of cereal. So the next 20 minutes was spent ripping open the cereal packet, hand picking the almond shavings, and putting it into the milk. Thankfully, I remembered mom telling someone always to add the sugar last while boiling milk so that it did not char.

So for the next 2 hours, the milk with tiny shavings of almond boiled. Two hours later when the milk had almost reduced to half its volume and had a brownish, thicker consistency to it post addition of the sugar, I knew my food was ready. I knew not what I had made of it and if it was an American version of payesh. But one mouthful and I was going mmmm mmmmmm mmmmm!

I thought it tasted a little like rasmalai, a little like rabri, and a little like kheer. The fat or malai was sticking to the walls of the pan with a thickness of almost a few millimeters, and scraping it with the steel spoon, the almond bits embedded in it was just…. just… just….Heavenly !!!

I licked my lips like a greedy cat, and man, finally after 4 am, it was the “sweetest” sleep I had. All puns intended.

sunshine.

Shitty Conversation.

Conversation with Ma and Grandma...

Hey mom. Hey Grandma. What's up? Got a missed call. Sorry I was in the bathroom.

Ma: Yeah, I guessed that your phone was elsewhere.

Uh, no. My phone was with me.

Ma: What? You carry your phone to the bathroom?

Yes of course. It’s just that I had the mp3 player plugged into my ears, so I didn’t hear the phone ringing. 

Ma: You carry the mp3 player to the restroom too?

Of course. But not everyday though. Most of the days when I have to go to the lab in the morning, I don’t get the time to listen to music this way. Usually, things are so rushed in the mornings that I have to grab a bite in the restroom itself.

Ma: Whattt !! You eat in the restroom too?

Only when I wake up late and have to hurry.

Ma: Unbelievable! Do you eat bananas and drink water and milk every day?

Yes of course!

Ma: Bathe in warm water, okay?

Sure, I do. Whenever I bathe, that is.

Ma: Now don’t tell me that you don’t bathe daily.

Well, US is a cold country you see. And a busy one as well. Weekends are the only times I get to take a bath in leisure.

Ma: Is there anything else? You take your personal belongings to the restroom, you eat in the restroom, and you do not bathe everyday. Do you sleep and do homework in the restroom too?

Grandma, from behind: Relax! She is just pulling your leg. 

You see, my grandma totally gets it. 

sunshine.

A Myth.

I was going through the Vegas pics when so many memories of this gentleman (gentle?) (man?) I met six months back came flashing. He is G's brother, and I am sure that as G and her mom are reading this post, they are looking for a broom, a ladle, anything to hit me on the head.

But I, dear readers, must write this post, because truth needs to be said. My apologies to G and her mom. 

When I was told one fine morning that her bro (lets us call him A-MYTH) from Singapore was visiting her for 3 months, my heart had leaped a beat at the prospect of meeting a tall, dark, handsome man at the airport. An overdose of reading sappy romantic novels, you see. Very subtly I had asked G the “So how junior he is to you?” question casually just to make sure that he wasn’t a fresh-out-of-high-school guy. 

Age calculation and everything done, I had cleaned my place for the first time he and G were to come over. He looked and talked fine (in fact he barely spoke the first time), but what the heck, we had 3 more months to get to know each other.

I was soon to revise my opinion.

Because for the next 3 months, he did everything (and I stress on the word EVERYTHING) to get on my nerves. 

How would you feel when the entire family is driving to Mount Rainier on a lovely morning, nicely sipping our milkshakes with Tamil music going full blast when the guy, sitting beside me at the back seat of the car, suddenly screams out- Aaiyyo- what is that thing protruding out? Alarmed, I look below to see him pointing at my belly. Aaiyyo- you have a huge paunch !!!

And suddenly everyone in the car goes into a fit of laughter.

That was the day I wish I had been a polyglot (one who speaks different languages), for I’d have used my entire vocabulary in all the languages I knew to give him an assorted collection of expletives.

And then with time, I was to discover so many eccentricities in him. Post-lunch while everyone was hurriedly wearing shoes and G was impatiently honking her car to signal us to leave, this chap would take his own sweet time, swaying his hips while he carried his half finished lunch in the car. Worse, after a heavy meal when no one would have space to eat anything, this chap would take a heaped spoon of gooey black Dabur-Chyawanprash lookalike substance (that he claimed would increase his appetite) and would be happily licking off the spoon and dangling his shorts-clad legs in the car.

This guy is a kitchen ninja. Though he cooks really well, it is a pain to assist him in the kitchen. He will give you the tiniest of the onions to chop and the soggiest of coriander leaves to peel. He made me chop the nastiest of onions for a picnic lunch, only to be told later that the onions were needed for dinner the next day. He christened me into a South Indian version of a name (like calling Ambar-Hambar) and ever since that is what I’ve been called by G and her entire family, friends, and friends of friends. What more, the moment I told G that some guy had a crush on me, I got a message (publicly) from A-myth the next day, asking me how my lover is doing.

Perhaps I had the worse time with him in Vegas. What else do you say to a guy who goes to sleep early setting his alarm clock at weird times like 3am, never really wakes up at 3am to study, and then screams his guts out the entire day that we didn’t wake him up on purpose and have put his career in jeopardy? He would keep deadlines hanging till the last moment and unable to complete them on time, he would send us on our guilt trips making statements like – You guys have stalled my career. In Vegas, every time he spotted a building, a fountain, a store, a mall, even a tree, or a cow, he would ask me to take a pic of him with the thing. And the moment I was about to click, he would make a somersault and ask me to halt, go remove his jacket and keep it on the floor, arrange his hair, look here and there, and then would flash his Kodak smile and let me click. What more, he would make specifications like- “Take the pic from my face to my knees only”, as if he was some celebrity and I was the cameraman. Every time I took a pic in Vegas, he would take away my camera from me and take a similar pic, telling me on my face that he didn’t trust my photographic skills. He would pick up the most complicated of meals in food joints. What more, he would take immense pleasure in describing gory details about how people ate anything from pigs testicles to snake livers back in his place till we would be on the verge of throwing up our meals. And of all the times when we would be hurrying to get a cab to catch the flight on time and have just checked out of the hotel and are on the streets, he will need to go find the restroom. Where are the coconut trees and the lamp posts when you needed them the most?

In a language in which even romantic words seem like dogfights to me (remember, Tamil teriyaad- I know no Tamil), he would incessantly argue with G, mindless of the fact that at least if he argued in English, I’d be able to understand the conversation and would know that he is not bitching about me. I remember how he incessantly kept arguing with me that he was a 6 feet something while I told him that I didn’t think he was a hair more than 5’10”. And forgiving him for all his follies when he went back to Chennai when I was expecting some great feedback to his parents about me, he went home and told his mom that he has never seen a girl who eats and sleeps more than I do.

Well well, I could keep complaining about him for hours now, and I am sure the next time I self-invited myself to G’s place (since she won’t invite me again after reading this), she will surreptitiously mix her cat food in my dinner, or put her cat in my bed while I am asleep. But then, truth, like the extra pounds on anyone's paunch, cannot be hidden. And all said and done, A-Myth will always remain a myth to me.

sunshine.

Meet My Roomie..

I have this irresistible urge to rave and rant about my ex-roomie today. It might take me a couple of posts, but trust me, it’ll be worth the read.

And for all those who didn’t know I have a roomie- yes, I did have one.

I met him a couple of years back at home. His mom and my dad had been childhood buddies. There was this excitement one weekend that there’s a guy from IIT who has taken out his valuable time to come visit us with his parents, and so we were woken early on a weekend to dust and clean the house, clean ourselves up and be our best selves. Already cursing the anticipated nerdy guy who we imagined would be a chashmish with heavily oiled hair combed neatly with a front centered parting, sitting shyly in between mumma and papa and nodding his head to everything, my sister and I decided to bully him. Our initial shock came out of seeing this tall, good-looking man looking ravishing in a black tee shirt with the words “IIT” typed visibly who was a far cry from the initial idea we had of a chashmish working on the computer. But bullying was a custom for anyone overly praised for their virtues by my parents. Soon, he was flanked with me and my sis and while my sis kept bombarding him with questions, I looked straight into his eyes and kept smiling and nodding till he got so uncomfortable that he would start squirming in his seat.

That was the plan originally. However my sis soon got tired of asking him questions, and I was asked to dutifully show him around the house. It is a custom to take anyone new to the terrace and take pride in showing him the view from there. Soon, we were on the terrace talking, and God knows how barriers fell, walls were broken, and we were exchanging email ids.

That was some three years ago. He has been one of my closest buddies ever since. So what if he was doing computer engineering in one of the best places and was a nerdy niner and we were so often reminded back at home how to be a good kid like he is and do well in academics? He is one of the most versatile guys who could live up to his goody boy image coming from a missionary school for boys, and be an equally rowdy engineering student.

It started with weekly emailing, monthly talking over the phone when he would be home and occasional meetings. How can I forget the way the aunty beside us was crying buckets in Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna while we kept making inane jokes about the Khans and the Bachchans and the aunties and everyone else. Apart from roaming around in Esplanade and my visits to his place to eat goat meat curry his mom made, the thing that got us so close was the fact that we could discuss anything under the sun.

When he went to Germany for his summers, he would tell me in detail about the people and the new stuff he learnt. And then I came to the US and talking became an occasional event. However we soon devised a method to be in touch. I made him my virtual roomie. Gmail and Gtalk helped us through this. We would be logged on to Gtalk 24/7, and while he did his assignments and I did mine, we kept chatting as if we were living in the same place. I would always be greeted with a good morning email from him when I woke up. And then we would talk about trivial stuff like mess food, what classes did you have today, and anything and everything under the sunlight and the moonlight. While he gave me funda on computer engineering and programming, I told him about my experiences in the US and how things were different here. We would write occasional letters to each other. But most importantly, my morning would start talking to him before I freshened up.

It was like having a person in your own room, talking to him, sharing stuff, despite the fact that the person lived half way across the world. We talked about everything, from computers to programming to biochemistry to politics, sports, his institute, my school, crushes, heartbreaks, family matters, and everything else. He has helped me in so many of my assignments by reading and editing and giving his feedback. I remember a particular quiz when I had scored a 5/35 (there was no credit for partially correct answers) when he actually used probability to calculate that the chances of anyone getting an answer correct was (1/2) to the power 7, so difficult the exam was. This had worked wonders to boost me up that day.

We have spent hours playing KBC when I would ask him inane questions with weird choices. I remember once we played “who do you think my latest crush is” and kept giving him options. By Jove, this brilliant guy narrowed down the choices and almost got most of the answers right.

Having a virtual roomie was fun. I could have someone to talk to, yet I had my space and privacy. It felt sad coming back to an empty room with no one to talk to. At the same time, I could be in my shorts with my unkempt hair and my room in a mess, and not worry about my roomie seeing me that way (the firewalls didn’t let us use camera). In an age when most of my friends complain about how poorly they get along with their roomies while they argue on every little thing ranging from who will cook what and who will pay for what, I have been fortunate in having a roomie who was never really physically present to give me a hard time, yet was always there whenever I needed him. The guy who taught me how to make power point presentations, the guy who taught me that more than meeting a deadline, it is important to beat the deadline, the guy whom I started to respect for his disciplined life and the way he handled priorities, he is the best roomie anyone could have.

But like all good things end, he graduated and went home. Ever since he left, I have felt this void, this emptiness in my room (though he was never really there), these inexplicable feelings of missing someone and not having someone to rush to and tell every time I spotted a good looking guy on the campus, felt low, or needed help with my assignments. He will be in the US soon, and I hope that we will be able to resume our roomie-ship then, though he will still be a good many time zones away. Interacting with him has made me a far better person and a far better friend.

I miss you roomie. I miss telling you my exam marks and you analyzing where things went wrong. I miss listening to the insane stories of your friends who dressed up like the Pandavas while going for an exam. I miss you cheering me up every time I cried. I miss you explaining me the concept of God while I yawned and flipped websites without you knowing it. I miss falling asleep at nights talking to you.

I miss you.

sunshine

It happened to me.

Ever seen nightmares and then woken up in the morning happy to be alive and realize that it was just a nightmare? And what when you wake up one fine morning to realize that the reality is much worse than the nightmare?

For one of the strategies I picked up from my engineering friends despite my non-engineering background was the fact that one was supposed to attack lessons the day before the exams. I know it is nothing to be proud of, but that is the way it works. It wasn’t that I’d touch my lessons only the evening before my exams. I would make notes (and I proudly claim, I make some very good notes), collect materials, highlight the important stuff, and keep everything ready. But the day prior to the exams was meant for cramming. 

Of course every time I have written an exam, I have pledged that henceforth I am never going to cram last moment again. But laziness afflicts me. 7 days before the exams, I knew I had a week to prepare. 6 days before, I knew it was too early to touch my notes. 5 days before, I thought that I would anyway forget stuff so early, so it is better that like buying vegetables, I did the job of cramming FRESH. 4 days to go, and work started in my lab at such a spree that I had time for nothing else. 2 days to go, and my prof from another course wanted me to rewrite a paper. And then, there was just a day before the exams.

But then again, when you work with living systems in the lab, cells do not grow at your convenience, and there are always instances when you have to rush to the lab or get things redone, despite the time and situation. The day before the exams, I had to go to the lab to work on my cells. Work continued till evening and by the time I came home, I knew I had no time to study for the exams. Once I reached home, I actually made a mental time frame. 5 minutes and I am done with checking my mails. 15 minutes to change and shower. 10 more minutes to heat and eat my dinner. 5 more minutes to make coffee. Things were going fine, just that I wish I could crash instead of studying after a hard day. Looking at the watch that showed me 8:30pm, I decided that a 90 minute nap would do me good to recharge my batteries. The night was going to be crucial. So I set my alarm to wake me up at 10 pm, and went to sleep. A quick mental calculation told me that I would still have 15 hours for the exam, and 8 lectures to cram. I should be fine.

So I closed my eyes, trying to sleep for a while. The alarm clock lay beside me. Purposefully, I slept on the sleeping bag, lest the comforts of the bed make it more difficult for me to wake up. And then, slowly, I was ensconced in the arms of Morpheus, the sleep God.

The next thing that happens is that I wake up to admire the faint shades of blue in the sky. What a beautiful morning, I think scrubbing my eyes as I look through the glass windows, twisting in my sleeping bag. What time is it? I rummage through my stuff for my wrist watch and squint at it- 5am? A little early in the morning to wake up. But wait! What day it is? Wasn’t I supposed to wake up the previous night and study? Holy shit !!

I was too confused, and past caring if the alarm didn’t go off or did I not wake up. I got myself an extra 7 hours of sleep instead of studying for the exams. For a brief moment, I wondered if I could complete the preparations at all and appear for the exams. And then there was this inexplicable thing, the fighter instinct that makes you struggle to breathe, the survival instinct that doesn’t let you give up, that told me that I could do it. I didn’t dare to eat, or drink that day. I approximately had 7 hours, and 8 lectures to cram. 

Thankfully I had my self made notes that made things a little easier for me (perhaps). And for the next 7 hours, I studied with an intensity I have seldom seen in me. My brain wasn’t an organ anymore, it was a huge sponge that soaked in all the information that poured in. It is amazing how we desperately seek survival strategies in times of stress.

For I remember how I crammed rote information. There was a gamut of effects to describe when exposed to a particular pesticide that would have taken me eons to remember. But suddenly, I found connections, made words using their first alphabets, arranged them in a sequence and learnt them. Here take a look at this-

Vitamin “A” depletion.

“B”ioaccumulation

“C”ardiac dysfunction.

“D”eregulation of lipid metabolism.

“E”nergy impairment.

I somehow managed to arrange these parameters in alphabetical order. I arranged words, found weird connections, visually imagined the radicals screwing up the organs in a certain process to cause cell death, and compared to mechanisms of cell injury and cell death to accidents and fatal accidents. Good mechanisms and bad mechanisms were compared to love making and molestation. I couldn’t possibly explain the ways I found to remember what I learnt. And those have been the worst 7 hours of my life. But somehow I managed to cram and revise and re-revise before the exams. I remember buying myself just a bottle of juice from the wending machine so that I had my blood glucose levels high and didn’t faint in the course of writing the exam. And of course the whole 7 hours of sleep the previous night had recharged my batteries enough to improve my concentration.

My only 2 concerns were to get all the known questions in the exam and to be able to remember everything. That I did. I hope I did well in that too. But this incident would remain etched forever as the nightmare that happened to me in real life. If you ask me, it was a traumatic experience to wake up on the day of the exams, having overslept and still not prepared a bit. It would only have been God and something inexplicable that made me remember all those stuff in so short a time.

Study in advance! Don't procrastinate!

Make sure the alarm clock is not screwed up. 

If needed, ask someone to wake you up and kick your ass every time you dozed off.

And stop believing that the more ahead of time you learn, the more ahead of time you forget.

sunshine.

Sweet Revenge

When I first arrived in the US, I used to be amused seeing everyone walking with their hands inside the hoodies (jacket pockets), two wires emerging out of their ears and vanishing somewhere in the pockets. I always wondered how did the walkmans or the CD players here looked, especially given the fact that I never really spotted something huge and rectangular peeping out. Soon, the dehati in me was to find out that there were no walkmans or CD players, these were ipods and mp3 players, slim rectangles about one index finger in length, 4 cm in breath, and perhaps half a match box high.

Soon, I found the Greek Gods and Goddesses in the gym using those stuff as they worked out. For a lazy person who could make up excuses ranging from karwa chauth to shivratri to not to go to the gym, I told myself that it was un-cool not to carry an ipod to the gym, so when I have enough money to afford one, I shall start working out. Soon, G was engaged in her favorite pastime, looking for deals on the net, and soon, I was the proud owner of an mp3 player. My first mp3 player. 

Buying something is easier than learning to use it. For a person who is as tech challenged as I am, I was too scared to open the packaging without G being around. So for the first few days, my mp3 player lay unopened and neatly packed beside the photo of Goddess Kali, the same photo dad had given me while leaving home and had asked me to keep on my study table and bow in front of at least once a day. Well, it was fun standing by the study table post shower and bowing first to Goddess Kali, and then to my new toy, something I was too scared to start handling on my own.

And then, the toy was taken to G in her office, and instead of explaining me how to use it, she started to make fun of me, asking me to go figure out things myself. Frankly, I did not even know how to charge it with this USB post on my laptop, until I was told to use the extension cord. G, I hope I got it right.

G must have taken pity on me, for she promised me that she would download some of the popular songs for me for a start. You see, I still do not know, despite her curt instructions, how to use Google and download songs for free.

So I was overjoyed that the devil had finally decided to meet me half way, stop laughing at me, and download some songs for me. Here, songs for you – was what she said sweetly, winking at me.

Uh-uh, so soon? Why thank you !!!!- I had exclaimed with all my innocence.

I did feel grateful, and all excited that I would finally get to use my toy. I wish I had broken a coconut on the floor and smeared some red vermilion on my mp3 player, just so that no “buri nazar” made it play song backwards or in an alien language. I made a mental note of getting it as a gift for someone on my next trip to India.

I would never know how I figured out the tiny buttons. I must have just guessed and pressed all of them, not knowing how to play, rewind, or fast forward songs. I was waiting for the bus on my way to the lab. I had hours of mundane lab work ahead. Alas, I’d finally get to hear some music while I performed the arduous task of running gels and buffering solutions.

I sat at my desk all excited, pressing every button on my toy, not really knowing which was the play button. Well, I must have hit it at some point, for suddenly there was loud, clear music. The best quality of music I have heard in a while. Silently in my head, I screamed- Sunshine goes Ammmmerrricannn.

It was some English rap music I was not familiar with. Well, since G told me these are the latest and the most happening songs, these must have been good. For a person who has no idea of non-hindi music, I did not even know if it was pop or hard rock I’d be listening to.

The first few seconds of heavenly music filled up my senses. Expecting some English song soon, I was surprised to hear a male voice singing words I had no clue about. Must be a really cool song. So I tapped my toe and rocked my head to the opening lines of the so called latest English music-

Macchham macchham macchhaam de…

Pucchhaam pucchhaamm puchcham de….

Sararara pararara

Manja sanja ganja linja tonja manja jaja jaja

Errr….. was this English rock? I rocked my head harder to understand the music.

Di di di, jaga jyoti jyoti jyoti.

Why did it remind me of jag ka jyoti (light of the universe)?

Sensing something is wrong, I got to the next song. And then…… Shit! G had downloaded all the Tamil songs for me. I quickly flipped through the other songs. These had to be songs in Tamil. The reason? Every song I listened to reminded me of mustached and half dhoti-clad men, and buxom women from the soap Suryaaaaaaaaaaaa Suryaaaaaaaaaaa. I did not need to know Tamil to identify the language G abused her pati parmeshwar (hubby dearest) in.

So all day in the lab, I have been listening to songs I wouldn’t know a word about. 

As a protest, I refused to turn the damn player off and listen to my type of songs from raaga.com or dishant.com. Every time someone passes by, I rock my head even more to show that I am thoroughly enjoying my music. And snippets of all I’ve been able to make out is-

Ada ada ada asa dada istyle

Dadada seri pada vistyle

Gada gada gada ada ada istyle

Kumpava Aambal aambal

Munnadayo Mavval mavval

Vaji vaji vaji in jeevan sivaji

Why did most sentences end with the word maadi? 

I know, this is a ploy of G to make me listen to Tamil songs all day. By the end of the day, I did pick up little bits of Tamil after all. I wanted to ask, 

Aadi paavi ari o kyun tuney mera peecha maadi?

And that needs no translation.

sunshine